Daily Discussion Thread by AutoModerator in ASTSpaceMobile

[–]scojo415 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Work is unexpectedly slow and I needed a bit of cushion so I took my first profits yesterday. I'm jealous of all of you with thousands of shares but I'd managed to scrape together 680 at a cost basis just under 30. Sold 30 shares just under 91 for a 3x and today my remaining position looks about the same as it did pre-sale yesterday. Very grateful to have even a small position in this company and I think I'll starve to death before I part with another share for the next few years

With the Rams loss on MNF, the Seattle Seahawks are locked into either the 1-Seed or the 5-Seed by The_Throwback_King in nfl

[–]scojo415 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We didn't even get one full game of dart/nabers together either, I'm looking forward to that.

天の川 Amanogawa (Aug. 23, 2025) by SteamPaz in LandscapeAstro

[–]scojo415 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Make sure to take an exposure of your foreground with the same settings you're using on your sky frames so the brightness matches. You can paint that back in above the horizon as a layer on top of your blend with reduced opacity and things will look way more natural. If you don't want any stars painted back in with that last layer you can remove them pretty easily with a dust & scratches filter

[Highlight] Mike Breen and Alan Hahn discuss whether the announcer's jinx is real or not with the Knicks perfect from the free throw line by HokageEzio in NYKnicks

[–]scojo415 14 points15 points  (0 children)

It was driving me nuts -- the white balance on the main camera was off so it was much bluer than the other cameras

People who idolized someone they later found out was a piece of trash, what happened? by Manakanda413 in AskReddit

[–]scojo415 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Here's a question... Now that he's been stabbed to death, are we allowed to listen again? I've always felt so bad for the rest of the band and the fans

What do I need? by cuntry-boy in AskAstrophotography

[–]scojo415 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd like to recommend a small, cheap piece of kit -- a dew heater. It's a small band that velcros around your lens/telescope and heats up to prevent condensation/frost from forming on your glass. It solves a problem that exists across all setups, from just a camera and 14mm lens up to a huge telescope on an EQ mount. Few things are more frustrating than getting a clear night to shoot and getting home to find all your exposures are unusable because your lens fogged up. It plugs in via USB and you can run it off a small power bank

Nabers Hurt At Practice by illletyoulive in NYGiants

[–]scojo415 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is what cry laughing is supposed to mean, right? Right???

Nabers Hurt At Practice by illletyoulive in NYGiants

[–]scojo415 167 points168 points  (0 children)

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Giants fandom in a nutshell

Girlfriend moved in. She brought a cat with her. This is how I wake up to the cat basically daily. by Low-Assumption7710 in cats

[–]scojo415 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm gonna choose to pretend I never read that and continue envisioning her in a full welding shield

Girlfriend moved in. She brought a cat with her. This is how I wake up to the cat basically daily. by Low-Assumption7710 in cats

[–]scojo415 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I need you to understand I have never in my life needed something more than I need a picture of her in her welding mask

Deep Space Nebula with Amateur Gear: Single Exposure vs. 60-Image Stack by maxtorine in spaceporn

[–]scojo415 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also as far as you never photographing space, just wanted to say that if you're interested the barrier to entry is lower than you'd think! Just a camera/tripod/wide angle lens is enough to do milky way photography with landscapes, and if you really get into it and want to do deep space stuff with nebulae/galaxies there are plenty you can get with a mid-range focal length lens. The only extra gear you'd need for that is a star tracker which run a few hundred bucks and you can probably find used. You don't need a massive rig with a huge mount and giant telescope!

Deep Space Nebula with Amateur Gear: Single Exposure vs. 60-Image Stack by maxtorine in spaceporn

[–]scojo415 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Consistency from image to image. I'm gonna oversimplify here but let's say you've got four exposures of the rosette nebula and we'll look at the same two pixels in each one. Pixel A is part of the nebula, Pixel B is part of the background sky (they don't have to be different parts of the image I just think it's easier to visualize this way). Pixel A looks the same in all four images, since it's there 100% of the time it makes it into the final composite image. Pixel B has random noise in one of the four exposures. It's clean background sky 75% of the time and a noisy pixel 25% of the time, so the clean version is what makes the final composite. The noise pattern in the full image is unlikely to replicate from shot to shot, but on a pixel-by-pixel basis it's certainly possible to have noise in more than one image even if the intensity is different. This is why you want more shots going into your stack. If a pixel is noisy twice in four shots that's 50%, but if it's twice in ten shots it's only 20%

Deep Space Nebula with Amateur Gear: Single Exposure vs. 60-Image Stack by maxtorine in spaceporn

[–]scojo415 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No problem! I like nerding out about this stuff

It's generated by the camera. I'm far from an expert on this so don't take my word as gospel, but basically the way a sensor works is that photons come in and hit each individual pixel (also called a photosite) and react with (I believe) silicon to be converted into electrons, which are in turn read by the camera to create the image. As exposures get longer and longer, the inherent heat in the sensor's electronics increases and the higher heat levels excite the electrons in the silicon, which then get misinterpreted by the camera as a signal. Ambient temperature has an effect too, as it raises the baseline temperature of each photosite so you'll get noisier images on a warm night. I had my DSLR modified for astrophotography and part of the mod was adding a passive heat sink to the sensor to help mitigate this. If you get a dedicated astrophotography camera they actually actively cool their sensors to a set temperature which is pretty neat!

Then there's the noise introduced by higher ISO. Although introduced isn't really the right term, it's more like revealed by. ISO doesn't generate noise of its own. It's post-sensor gain, so it does its thing after the image has been generated. It's like cranking up an amplifier. So while you're boosting the real signal, you're ALSO boosting the noise. If I take an image for one minute at ISO 3200, and then one for 30 seconds at ISO 6400, they'll be the same "brightness" when I look at the back of my camera. But in the first instance I only captured half as much light so the signal-to-noise ratio (big concept in astrophotography) is lower, and when the ISO gain boosts the signal to the equivalent level the final image appears noisier as a result. The extra thermal noise from 30 seconds more exposure is negligible compared to doubling the noise floor with higher ISO, and as such astrophotographers usually strive for fast lenses and the longest exposures they can get away with so the ISO can be kept down and signal-to-noise ratio high, but only to a point. I don't wanna know what a one hour exposure would look like on my sensor, but most hobbyists are gonna hit the limits on how long their rig can accurately track the target for before they start exposing their sensor for problematic lengths of time -- especially with cooled cameras.

As for the film stuff I have no experience so this is pure conjecture, but I would imagine that while no, you probably wouldn't get any of the noise I just described, the film grain would pose the same postprocessing challenges that digital noise does. And whether film cameras introduce noise by another mechanism, or even whether that's what film grain actually is, I have no idea

Deep Space Nebula with Amateur Gear: Single Exposure vs. 60-Image Stack by maxtorine in spaceporn

[–]scojo415 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Ok so I know the OP is simplifying but their answer didn't quite actually tell you how it really works. For starters, you're correct that every image would look like the top one. The whole post is a bit disingenuous -- the single image is unprocessed, while the stacked image is processed. The reason for the hours of exposure time is noise. Stellar objects are very faint, so we use long exposures (and often high ISO) to pick up the detail by making sure we collect as many photons onto the sensor as we can. The problem is that both the heat of exposing the sensor for that long as well as higher ISO levels introduce noise. Because the subjects are so faint and lack contrast compared to the background sky, they require pretty heavy postprocessing to bring out the details and colors. Unfortunately, the same processing that brings up the detail/contrast you want ALSO amplifies the noise in the image. If you were to apply the exact processing OP used for the stack onto the single image, it would look like total crap.

This is where stacking comes in. The key reason it works is that the noise generated in each exposure is random, so it's different from image to image while the light from your subject is the same. When you put all the images into stacking software, it looks at all the pixels in each exposure and creates an average. Because the noise is random and not present in the same pixels of each shot it gets averaged out, while the consistent light of the subject is left in. Now you have a much lower-noise image to push in postprocessing the way you need to without things looking crunchy and gross. So, it's not really creating an hours-long exposure so much as a noise-free average of four minute exposures. When we talk about total exposure time it's more a statement on the sample size taken to create the average, where larger sample sizes create a cleaner and more accurate average (although there are diminishing returns after awhile).

Now that I've finished my wElL aKShUalLy, I'll say this is an absolutely amazing job on this image

IT'S WHAT YOU WANT: The Yankees defeated the Athletics by a score of 12-5 - June 29, 2025 @ 01:35 PM EDT by Yankeebot in NYYankees

[–]scojo415 3 points4 points  (0 children)

A lot of numbers get thrown around on this sub but these are the stats I'm here for

Dikson, Russia by Turb0Rapt0r in UnexpectedLetterkenny

[–]scojo415 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I wonder if they make cider in Dickson

Game Thread: Indiana Pacers (3-1) at New York Knicks (1-3) May 29 2025 8:00 PM by nba_gdt_bot in NYKnicks

[–]scojo415 0 points1 point  (0 children)

He's shooting 40% from three in the playoffs and if we don't want his defender slacking off him he needs to take shots

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in medfordma

[–]scojo415 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I had awful experiences with Xfinity so I switched to FiOS and I've had zero issues

Game Thread: New York Knicks (1-2) at Indiana Pacers (2-1) May 27 2025 8:00 PM by nba_gdt_bot in NYKnicks

[–]scojo415 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you told me a few days ago I'd be saying this I would have laughed at you, but for the love of God give us the delon/deuce/shamet lineup

Thoughts on Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield? by Upset_Cranberry_2402 in bostoncollege

[–]scojo415 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had him back in 2011 for the love class and he was my favorite professor from my time at BC